The Assembly leader, in a smackdown on reporters, doesn't want journalists interviewing lawmakers at the rear of the chambers -- a restriction that's among several new rules being drafted. So the year is barely a week old and the Assembly already has pulled its first butch.
From the Bee's Jim Sanders: "Reporters will be barred from interviewing legislators in the back of the Assembly chambers under new rules ordered by Speaker John A. Pérez before Monday's first session of 2013."
"The prohibition is among several rule changes imposed by Pérez that restrict press movement within chambers during floor sessions and tighten access to legislators immediately afterward."
"Assembly sergeants-at-arms said they have been told only about new restrictions involving the press, not legislative aides. But Pérez's spokeswoman Robin Swanson said the spirit of the new rules is expected to extend to staff, too."
Miserable traffic is the bane of life in Caliifornia cities, and the Bay Area commutes are among the worst in the country. But a new report sheds some surprising light on the problem.
From the Mercury-News' Mike Rosenberg: "A groundbreaking study by UC Berkeley and MIT researchers has pinpointed a small group of drivers making Bay Area freeways miserable for the rest of us, though the reason may surprise you."
"These commuters aren't necessarily slow or bad drivers. Instead, they come from a few outlying neighborhoods and travel long distances together in the same direction like schools of fish -- clogging up not only the roads they drive on, but also everyone else's."
"The study's authors anonymously tracked more than 350,000 Bay Area drivers using their cellphone and GPS signals -- the first time that's been done -- to gather some of the most detailed data yet on what causes our traffic jams. Caltrans and local transportation officials are now reviewing the results and plan to incorporate simple measures such as additional metering lights to spread out the volume of drivers coming from places where residents suffer the worst traffic, including southeast San Jose, Hayward, Dublin, San Rafael and San Ramon."
Meanwhile, the governor and his top corrections staff say the feds should back off on their order to cut inmate crowding in state prisons.
From Denny Walsh and Sam Stanton in the Bee: "Gov. Jerry Brown's administration, filing court documents just two hours before the court-ordered deadline to explain how the state will reduce inmate populations, said progress made so far is sufficient to warrant the federal court withdrawing its order."
"It also said the court-ordered reductions could needlessly force the state to release dangerous or violent inmates."
"The overcrowding and health care conditions cited by this Court to support its population reduction order are now a distant memory," the court papers state. "California's vastly improved prison health care system now provides inmates with superior care that far exceeds the minimum requirements of the Constitution."
A multibillion-dollar settlement stemming from the depths of the recession when banks booted loans and mortgages is drawing fire from consumer advocates.
From the Chronicle's Carolyn Said: "Consumer advocates on Monday questioned the effectiveness of an $8.5 billion settlement to resolve charges that 10 major banks mishandled foreclosures and loan modifications, saying details remain murky and that the amount of money will be minimal once distributed among millions of people."
"Some of the settlement, which was announced by federal regulators after weeks of negotiations, will go directly to people whose homes were repossessed, while other funds are targeted to help struggling homeowners avert foreclosure. "We want to see that borrowers are made whole in as many ways as possible," said Sasha Werblin, senior program manager at the Greenlining Institute, a Berkeley nonprofit that works for economic equity..."
"In a separate action also announced Monday, Bank of America agreed to pay $10 billion to Fannie Mae to settle charges that its Countrywide Financial subsidiary sold the agency mortgages obtained with slipshod underwriting, such as failure to verify borrowers' incomes or homes' values. Many of those mortgages, issued from 2000 to 2008, later went into foreclosure, triggering big losses."
From HealthyCal's Kate Moser: "But many limited English-speaking patients still lack the interpreters necessary to have meaningful communication with medical providers, particularly in emergency scenarios. The problem is acute for the communities of indigenous Mexican immigrants in California, advocates and practitioners say."
“The root of the problem is that until fairly recently, the huge indigenous population in California was under the radar,” said Sandra Young, a family nurse practitioner at a clinic in Oxnard and the president of the Mixteco/Indigena Community Organizing Project."
"Many indigenous Mexican immigrants are farmworkers, the most recent arrivals in the state’s agricultural labor market, according to the Indigenous Farmworker Study, a California Endowment-funded study completed in 2010."
